


Kat's Kitten Katastrophe

by NellieOleson



Category: Stargate SG-1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 03:48:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12472788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NellieOleson/pseuds/NellieOleson
Summary: Kittens. That's it.





	Kat's Kitten Katastrophe

**Author's Note:**

> So, once upon a time, me, katcorvi, and annerbhp were wondering if every possible Sam/Jack story had been written. And annerbhp said: "I've never read a story where Sam has a litter of kittens." Which is weird and kind of specific, but ok.  
> And katcorvi has been bugging me to write that plot ever since.  
> So here we are. Enjoy this unbeta'd, garbage fic. It's awesome and you should definitely read it.

“Another day, another pyramid.” 

Daniel considered that while he unclipped his tinted lenses and put them in his pocket. This was their third pyramid in as many weeks. Not quite every day, but still, some variation in the architecture would be nice. Something with windows, maybe. 

The bright rectangle of sunlight faded out at the edges of the room where the walls were lined with empty sconces. The tunnels leading deeper into the structure were dark and quiet, full of air that hadn’t been disturbed in a lifetime. His boots scraped along the gritty floor, and he peered into the darkness, relieved when nothing peered back at him.

“At least this one is empty,” he told Jack. 

Jack stepped out from behind a column with his weapon up, scanning back and forth as he walked the perimeter with Teal’c. “We’ll see,” he said. 

Some days Daniel wished there were more optimism in his life. He tried to make eye contact with Sam so she could silently commiserate with him, but she was kneeling in front of the lonely MALP that had been feeding them sensor data for three days. 

“It’s empty, sir.” Sam patted the MALP like she was rewarding it for a job well done. 

“Like I said, Carter. We’ll see.” It wasn’t that Jack didn’t trust Sam, he’d just been stuck in perpetual jackass mode this mission. Sam’s reaction to Jack’s jackassery did nothing to help.

Daniel watched them while he dug his flashlight out of his pack. He wasn’t sure if Sam was even aware of the look she gave Jack in these moments—that eye-rolling grin that was sure to make Jack try his best to get her do it again. Because Jack _was_ aware, though he’d deny it if Daniel ever broached the subject. 

Jack finished his perimeter walk and aimed his tactical light down the main corridor. “Let’s move out,” he said. Sam put on her serious face and fell in behind Jack, adding her light to his. 

Daniel followed them both, his own flashlight bouncing from side to side as he tried to get a sense of the writing on the walls. 

Teal’c walked behind Daniel with nothing but a look that suggested dependence on artificial light was a weakness he would never succumb to.

*****

They made their way through the interior at a pace that allowed Daniel to light the torches and read the story engraved in the stone walls. It was a familiar Egyptian tale and didn’t require too much of his attention. 

Teal’c hovered over his shoulder while he read, and Jack traced the lines on the floor with his boot. The sound was grating and Daniel wanted to strangle him. If he mentioned it, Jack would never stop.

“Daniel,” said Jack. “What’s with all this Hello Kitty shit?”

Daniel looked more closely at the intricate cat motif running along the floor. He’d mostly been concerned with the writing on the walls, which was also about cats. “Some of the Egyptians worshipped cats,” he said. It wasn’t a very helpful comment, but it was unlikely Jack wanted any more detail than that.

“Yeah, I know.” Jack brushed sand off the bright green eyes of an elegant looking cat holding a snake in its mouth. It was surrounded by several other equally elegant looking cats. “This just seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

“Well, sir, the Goa’uld are nothing if not excessive,” said Sam.

“Guess I can’t argue with that,” said Jack. 

Daniel thought Jack could, in fact, argue with that. Some days Daniel was convinced Jack made a point to argue against everything. 

They continued down the long central hall to the inner chamber, stopping just outside the entrance. Daniel read the inscription over the door out loud: "You are the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods, and the judge of words, and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the holy Circle; you are indeed the Great Cat." 

Jack drew a circle in the air while he talked. “The holy circle? As in-”

“The stargate? Probably.” Daniel walked into the room and waved his flashlight around trying to see everything at once. He read the story to himself this time. “I’ve seen this story before,” he said. “In Egypt. Mau Aa, the great cat, was thought to fight the serpent Apep, who we know as Apophis, to protect Ra.” 

“Nice,” said Jack. “Giant, Goa’uld fighting cats. How cool is that?”

Daniel wondered if Jack actually thought there were literal cats involved in the story but was afraid to ask. He turned to Teal’c instead.

“Teal’c, have you ever heard of a Goa’uld named Bast?”

Teal’c tipped his head just enough to let Daniel know he was putting some thought into his reply. “I have not,” he said.

“What are you thinking, Daniel?”

“Well, Jack’s right about the cat references in this place.”

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

Jack turned to Sam just so he could repeat that. “I am.”

Sam smiled indulgently, Jack grinned at her like the fool he pretended to be, and Daniel questioned his life choices.

“I thought maybe this place might belong to Bast, assuming she was a Goa’uld.” He was mostly talking to himself at this point, but Jack answered him anyway.

“Never heard of her.”

“She was an Egyptian deity, possibly a daughter of Ra. Had a big cat cult in Bubastis?” 

Jack was still giving him a blank look—a real one. He’d learned to differentiate the feigned ignorance from the real thing years ago. It had been a challenge; Jack was easy to underestimate. 

“Nevermind,” he said. “I’ll keep reading.”

“You do that. I’ll keep ...not. Reading.”

That was all for Sam’s benefit again. Jack kept looking over at her, but Sam had other things going on. She was scanning the room with her hand-held science machine, standing in the center and turning a slow circle. Her eyes kept dropping to the device. Even in the faint and unsteady light Daniel could see the concern on her face.

“Sir,” she said. “I’m picking up some low-frequency radio signals.”

Jack’s demeanor changed like someone flipped a switch. He went to Sam’s side and adjusted his grip on his weapon. “From what?”

“I don’t know. They seem to be coming from everywhere.”

“Do we need to leave?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll let you know if I get anything else.”

Daniel took out a notebook and began transcribing the writing. Radio signals were uninteresting to him. 

They were probably uninteresting to Jack too. Sam, however, was not. Jack started following her around while she investigated her mystery radio waves. Teal’c stood near Daniel, looking prepared to blast any radio waves that got out of hand. 

The story playing out on the walls was a more fleshed out version of one he’d read in The Book of the Dead. He read the tale of the wrathful Eye of Ra until the familiar sound of a ring transporter echoed in the small space.

Teal’c had his staff weapon up before Daniel could turn around. Sam and Jack were in the center of the room again, surrounded by the bright light of the rings. The rings dropped, leaving a bunch of nothing behind. 

They didn’t have time to react or panic before the rings activated a second time, leaving a pile of things that made no sense. The light from the P90s lying on the floor cast matching wedges across the room. Daniel didn’t even notice the cats until one of them stood up and yelled. 

“Well, this is new,” he said to Teal’c as they made their way to the ring platform.

Daniel imagined Sam and Jack were in a similar situation somewhere else. On an orbiting ship, maybe, surrounded by cats with an unknown agenda. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing they’d come across. 

He believed that right up until the moment he noticed the dog tags hanging around the neck of the big gray cat that had yelled at him. 

Teal’c was kneeling by the white cat, and he picked Sam’s BDU top out of the pile of fabric it was standing on. 

“Daniel Jackson,” he said, holding it up so Daniel could read the name tag. Teal’c looked as alarmed as he could manage, and Daniel’s hopes of an easy mission slipped away. 

“Oh,” said Daniel. “I never thought it was literal.” 

The gray cat walked over and head-butted his leg. Daniel reached down and pulled the dog tags from its neck. He changed his mind about this not being the strangest thing to have ever happened. 

The white cat was trying to climb onto Teal’c’s knee. “To what do you refer?” Teal’c asked.

“Ra was— literally—the cat, Mau," said Daniel. And, boy, that really added a whole new dimension to all the history he thought he knew. 

“You believe O’Neill and Major Carter have been transformed into cats?”

“That’s exactly what I think, Teal’c.” Daniel felt like he’d gone back in time and was telling people the pyramids were landing pads for alien ships. 

They looked around the chamber, trying to find a way to reactivate the rings. It was their best hope for reversing the process and seemed easier than trying to explain to General Hammond that two of his top officers had been turned into housepets.

There were two control panels on opposite walls but both had a round indentation where the buttons should have been. One side had an inscription—The Eyes are Upon You— the other was blank. They might have been able to figure something out if Sam still had opposable thumbs. 

She was a lot less helpful as a cat.

 

********

General Hammond had been in command of the SGC for too long to be surprised when they returned with two cats. He didn’t even look concerned until the wormhole snapped shut with no sign of Sam or Jack.

“Do you want to explain what’s going on, Dr Jackson?”

Daniel motioned toward the cats with his best ‘ta-da!’ wave. They were sitting on the gate ramp, close together, looking like they were somehow in charge of the whole situation. 

“Jack and Sam were turned into cats,” he said. He managed to sound less alarmed than he felt. Panic wasn’t going to help the situation. 

“Well,” said General Hammond. “What are we supposed to do with them?”

*******

What they did, was lock them in an isolation room to keep them safe until they figured out how to reactivate the rings. 

Daniel moved a desk into the room so he could keep them company while he worked. Siler and Teal’c were also frequent visitors—Teal’c was helpful, Siler was only there for the cats. Daniel started to suspect he’d prefer to keep Sam and Jack that way. Every other day there was a new toy, and the elaborate climbing structure he’d been building was getting a bit out of hand as far as Daniel was concerned.

“It is possible the secrets of this technology died along with Ra.” Teal’c was trapped on the bed. The white cat was on his chest, purring loud enough that Daniel could hear her from his desk, and the gray cat was between his feet, attacking his boot laces any time he moved. He’d been there for two hours already and the cats didn’t look they were going to give up their spots any time soon.

 

“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. They were going to have to fix this on their own. He looked over the story of the Great Cat one more time. That cat had been acting a lot more Goa’uld-like than cat-like. “The symbiote must have protected Ra,” he told Teal’c. It would only be useful to take another form if you were still you on the inside. Sam and Jack weren’t exactly acting like normal house cats, but they weren’t far from it. 

Teal’c nodded, slowly because the white cat was asleep now. It reminded Daniel that he should be getting some rest too. They’d been putting in a lot of hours going over the video from the pyramid. He said goodnight to Teal’c and went to the quarters he kept on base. 

It took some outside help from Catherine to figure out the ring panels. She made the connection from the inscriptions to the amulet she’d been wearing for so many years at the end of the second week. 

It was a big step, but only solved half of their problem. To make it work, they’d need two. Hathor and Sekhmet were the only other names referred to as the Eye of Ra that they knew for sure were Goa’uld and neither of them had left an amulet behind. Daniel contacted as many allies as possible to help with the search, but it still took almost a month to get a lead. 

That lead showed up in the form of a Tok’ra they’d never met. 

The cats were all hopped up on General Hammond’s homegrown catnip when the Klaxons went off. They stopped dead at the sound, stared at the flashing red light, and Daniel wondered, again, how much of Jack and Sam were still in there. 

Two days later, he and Teal’c were packing their things and heading for an abandoned Goa’uld stronghold on a planet that could only be reached by ship. It was a long trip, made worse by the fact that their Tok’ra shipmate had no interest in the two of them. He quit trying to engage Artran or his host after a week and spent the rest of the time reading and playing cards with Teal’c.

*****

General Hammond met them at the bottom of the ramp when they returned, looking like he’d had a long month. “Doctor Jackson, Teal’c. It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back,” said Daniel because it was. He’d never been so glad to see the dull gray walls of the gateroom. “How are Jack and Sam?”

General Hammond sighed at looked at his shiny shoes before answering. “We have ourselves a bit of a situation here.”

That didn’t sound promising. If anyone was going to have a ‘situation’, it should have been him and Teal’c, but their entire mission had gone smoother than any Daniel could remember. 

“What happened?” he asked.

“I think you need to see for yourself.”

They went to the cat room, single file, looking like the world’s saddest parade. General Hammond let out a resigned sigh when he opened the door. The gray cat greeted Daniel, winding around his legs and yelling at him. He seemed okay, and Daniel panicked for a moment, thinking something terrible had happened to Sam. 

Something had happened to Sam, but Daniel wasn’t sure if it was something terrible—something Sam herself would adamantly disagree with later. She crawled out from under the bed and was followed by three fluffy surprises. 

It took Daniel longer than it should have to realize where the kittens had come from.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess we should have separated them.” He’d been assuming that Sam and Jack were somehow still there, a part of the cats in some way. It took less than a minute to come back around to that theory because he really couldn’t be sure the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they had been kept in the same room for three months as human beings. 

**********

They had to bring the kittens to the planet along with the cats because neither would leave without them. Daniel carried them in a small box while the cats paced nervously around his legs until he sat the box on the ring platform.

He placed one amulet into the wall, and Teal’c placed the other. The rings came down and picked up all the cats. It took a lot longer for them to return than it had the first time. Daniel wasn’t sure if that was a good sign, and the idea that the kittens might come back as _babies_ started to take hold in his thoughts. 

“Oh, thank god,” he said to nobody in particular when the rings finally deposited everyone back into the room. The kittens, thankfully, were still just kittens, fluffy and cute. 

“Carter? Were we just-” Jack’s eyes went wide and Daniel handed him a blanket to cover himself. “Why am I naked.” His voice climbed higher when he noticed Sam. “Why is Carter naked?” 

Sam was staring hard at the pile of kittens, ignoring Jack, Daniel, and the blanket Teal’c was holding out to her. Daniel winced at the confused recognition on her face. He’d been hoping neither of them would remember the last few months. 

“Oh, my god,” said Sam. “Are those mine?”

Oh yeah, thought Daniel. 

This one was going to be hard to explain.


End file.
